John Light

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John is TPM‘s Prime editor. His writing has also appeared at The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, UN Dispatch, Vox, Worth, and Al Jazeera, and has been broadcast on Public Radio International. Before joining TPM, John was a producer for Bill Moyers and WNYC, and worked as a news writer for Grist. He grew up in New Jersey, studied history and film at Oberlin College, and got his master‘s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

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John

This week was defined by a new level of overt racism from the President, and the utter failure of the overwhelming majority of those in his party to respond to it.

Here’s what happened in Prime.

A reader, the child of immigrants from India, writes: “I know Trump is a bully, I know he’s trying to rally his racist supporters, I know he’s trying to distract from other issues, but at the end of the day he’s challenging my identity as an American, as someone who BELONGS in this country. That causes real pain and real trauma.”

A reader writes in about how a New York Times article changed his opinion of his favorite candidate.

Documents unsealed this week show panic in Trumpworld as the deal with Stormy Daniels almost collapsed in 2016.

Josh Kovensky digs into the bizarre details of the NRA’s planned giving program.

Josh Marshall writes: “I’ve noticed a pattern accelerating in recent days by which the latest outrage from the President — whether it’s a new bad act, suspicious DOJ decision, rape accusation or racist outburst — leads Democrats not to vituperation against the President but a new round of increasingly febrile agitation and attacks against the congressional leaders of their own party.”

A reader responds: “What’s missing here is any kind of communication from the party leadership that they feel the same apocalyptic urgency about the threat to democracy that the base does.”

In case you missed it, we published two remembrances of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens at TPM Cafe this week, both by prominent law professors who clerked for Stevens.

Deborah Pearlstein writes on how Stevens might respond to the Trump administration’s census shenanigans. Amanda Cohen Leiter reflects on Stevens’ propensity for writing his own opinions, even when arriving at the same conclusions as other justices, in order to preserve his thinking for posterity.

I’ve been a reader for a very long time, I read all your stuff. I’m Prime AF, but I haven’t written in seven years. I think that part of it is that politics are very personal for me. I’ve been very close to local politics where I live, I was a Congressional staffer, and I ran for office myself, and none of that comes close to the politics of today. Today we are in a space where politics are all about who we are, all about our identity.

My parents moved from India to the US in the 70’s and my brother and I were born in the US. Neither of my parents were US citizens at the time, so maybe that makes us anchor babies. When Trump tweeted those statements about going back to where you come from, I was brought back not to India, but to my childhood. I was bullied for the color of my skin, for the language my parents spoke, for our religion, and for our food. I’ve been told to go back to where I come from or to leave this country a number of times in my life. I know Trump is a bully, I know he’s trying to rally his racist supporters, I know he’s trying to distract from other issues, but at the end of the day he’s challenging my identity as an American, as someone who BELONGS in this country. That causes real pain and real trauma.

The President’s golf club is hosting a strip club event. Register today to pick your own “caddy girl” — after the deadline, you’ll have to participate in an auction to decide which cabaret dancer drives your golf cart. The event was ostensibly a fundraiser for a local nonprofit — until, following reporting by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold and TPM’s Matt Shuham, the non-profit bailed.

That’s all a lot of fun. In the background, there’s another story: With Trump in the White House, the Trump properties aren’t doing great.

We’ve met the candidates, though, as David Kurtz pointed out at regular intervals throughout debate night, it’s not clear the format contributed much to us learning anything new about them. Good thing we’ve got many, many more debates before 2020!

This year, the Democratic primary is heavy on ideas. Unlike the Republican primary in 2016 from which Donald Trump emerged, or even past Democratic primaries, there is one leading candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has propelled herself into frontrunner territory with a relentless focus on far-reaching policy proposals.

On Friday, a New York Times article made the rounds which profiled the Concerned Community Citizens (“or C-Cubed”) of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, an Islamophobic group obsessing over the local population of Somali refugees and fretting about white replacement. “I think of America, the great assimilator, as a rubber band, but with this — we’re at the breaking point,” Kim Crockett, vice president of a think tank called the Center of the American Experiment, told the Times. “These aren’t people coming from Norway, let’s put it that way. These people are very visible.”

We published an article at TPM Cafe this week that takes a look at how “deepfakes” could impact the 2020 election. These altered images and videos could be an equally if not more dangerous relative of 2016’s “fake news.”

Next week, we’re looking ahead to the Democratic debates — the first time in which many of the candidates will formally engage with one another. Here’s who made the cut, and here’s what we know about format.

And here is what happened in Prime this week:

A former Boeing executive is out and a former Raytheon lobbyist is in at Trump’s Pentagon.

The story behind our story this week on a potential on why a move in Trump’s trade war with China was prompting concern about overseas Americans’ voting rights.

“The 2016 outcome was a shocking as well as a calamitous result, one based on significant albeit sometimes overstated polling misses in the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Still, it’s warped our collective understanding of just what’s happening in the 2020 cycle.”

The Supreme Court’s Monday 5-4 decision in a racial gerrymandering case will only affect Virginia, but it will affect Virginia in a very big way.